Tag: Art

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Aesthetics

Day 1747 and Hyper Autistic Protestant Work Ethic Beauty Blog

I spent some time being really “in my special interest” today writing about why I think we should give more, and not less, time to beauty. I’ll post it to my new substack tomorrow as that will remain focused in subject matter.

Appearances clearly matter in every facet of life, but we don’t do much to help develop taste even as we face an onslaught of the hyper visual unrealistic world of short form video.

It’s all dopamine drips and quick hits that make it hard to develop taste of your own. At best you found algorithms that suited some things you could enjoy but sincerely held joy is rare. I’ve been able to experience many times and it’s now one keeps going in a cruel world.

I spent so much of my life beating the drumbeat of more access to the secret knowledge of the world only to discover again and again, that even if you offer up to the world pearls, not everyone will want them.

Or as my mother liked to say her Latin teacher said “I’m throwing pearl’s before swine!”

To appreciate the details is to recognize that layer upon layer of irritation worked to a finished pearlescent sheen which seems too delicate to truly show the process. That’s its beauty.

Each layer of culture is built by people who cares about details. And all kinds of details matter. Sometimes the details are financial. Sometimes aesthetic. Sometimes it’s noticing a very specific signal inside a very particular group and being able to admire the elegances.

I myself didn’t think I ever much went in for subtlety of any kind until I spent more of my time in mass markets. I’ve come to realize I was allowed to live without too much push on my own tastes for so much of my life.

And because I care about details, now I know I a stupid amount about the business of appearances because I worked at its heart.

So naturally I’d like to do more to share that knowledge as I realize it is maybe much rarer than I realized.

I intend to do it as a fun addition to my life as I experience so much of life through professional and personal interest in technologies. I’ve got aspirations for a world where we choice to work to be better. That requires a world where beauty can be cultivated in improving ourselves. so you can be certain I appreciate the angles of how we use the existing culturally technologies at hand to create the new ones.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1737 and The Life You Save Might Be Your Own

I don’t know if high schools still teach Flannery O’Connor. I’m not entirely clear if we even teach American literature to college students anymore if I’m honest.

Reading literature for enjoyment seems to have been reduced to mostly pornography, but I suppose that’s what they said about D. H. Lawrence a hundred years ago so maybe I shouldn’t judge.

Why else would we read fiction if not for the vitality? And what goes from fiction to literature is a reflection of its time.

What it means to be alive, and experiencing the consequences of one’s actions, can feel pornographic if the subject is genuinely exposed. I’m not so sure the explicit and the erotic are any worse a subject than the base and the broken.

That is my awkward segue into the stroke of good luck which introduced me to French existentialism and Southern Gothic literature in the same year as a teenager.

Reading Albert Camus and Flannery O’Connor roughly contemporaneously stood me in relatively good stead throughout the years as to assessing how little we deserve grace in this truly absurd world. Great horrors in a Christian world are hard tests of faith.

As an aside, it’s funny how we ask about her racism and but I doubt an American would have a nuanced view of pied-noir authors in the French pantheon, but I’m not here to decolonize anyone. Have a hazelnut.

Human frailty is my point, and we justify a lot under that sad reality, even as it’s simply true we are all committing a litany of sin by existing.

Literature explores the quiet horrors that we are damaged people in a broken world. That is why we read literature in the first place.

If not for our search for our humanity, we may as well be consuming information via a machine synopsis of a bloated airport book. Thank goodness information pornography is rapidly becoming ever more déclassé than reading romantasy. Malcolm Gladwell may struggle with that one.

I think it’s fine to explore the vitality of human choice and our pragmatic darkness in the safety of fiction. Reality is often much darker. We could all stand to live our lives a little more, even if we are afraid of the shadows our actions cast.

And as part of that effort the first thing I’d drop is spending time on reading book length business explainers. Replace it with short fiction and the life you save may be your own.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1734 and Oink Oink Slop Slop Piggie Piggie

It’s seems a tad unfair to use our porcine friends as comic stands in whenever we wish to mock trough consumers of remixed refuse. Pigs are intelligent animals whose biological closeness to human may allow us to use their organs in a pinch. We insult ourselves when we insult pigs.

And yet every time some new form of processed artificial intelligence content drops, we call it slop. Sooie!

Neither pigs nor humans deserve that kind of diet, even if we are both omnivores willing to consume just about anything. Staying alive sometimes requires a bit less discretion in diet.

Presumably so does staying spiritually healthy as well. If there is no Mozart to be had, I’ll take Moby. If there is no Melville then we take a pithy viral tweet. Where is the event horizon of art?

Michael Pollen called it the omnivores dilemma in our food system. When it comes to our art, it doesn’t seem like much of a dilemma. More creation and more tools for creativity are a social good but when it becomes regurgitation and re-ingestion does it not seem liable to make us soul sick?

And yet the industrialization of food has inspired the industrialization of all forms of content. Scale has indeed become the standard way we’ve come to feed our bodies and mind. It was Gut with Gutenberg but where are the limits? Do we even know?

Facebook and OpenAI both released new content creation tools this week that were widely derided as slop factories in my circles.

Of course, I spend my time on the written web amongst producers of the tools that produce the slop. We think we know better and can use these tools wisely. We know what’s in it, or at least we have the know how that programs the machines extrude it. Some of us have some sense of the original material but precious few.

The engineers who built the Doritos factory probably enjoy a cheesy corn chip too even if they can afford aged cheddar thanks to pay which came with popularity of their creation. Imagine how a medieval peasant would have felt encountering that much extreme nacho cheesiness.

The intelligentsia of the written web like Substack, Twitter and Reddit (admittedly that being an intelligentsia is a funny conceit) presumes the unwashed TikTok, Reels and Shorts masses have no taste and will consume anything and without end.

Video? How gauche! But isn’t it just so funny when our elders can’t tell the video of the lady breaking the bridge with a rock isn’t real. Ha ha! Stupid oldsters. We don’t realize soon we won’t be able to tell either. Walter Benjamin knew it was coming. He aura farmed too.

My brother told me recently that our grandmother worked in a hotdog factory and refused to eat processed meat for the rest of her life. I also won’t eat hot dogs or sausages so maybe the sense memory runs deep.

I admit that I feel the same way about encased meats as I do about short form video content. No amount of condiments or “answering to a higher authority” will entice me into consuming the stuff. ConAgra owns Hebrew National now and they answer to the stock market not God.

Even if there are artisanal varietals of processed meats (and processed content), I struggle with the ease with which it bypasses my satiety filters. We have peptides for overconsumption of food but not yet overconsumption of dopamine.

It’s fine if we crave whole meats and whole books. Or at least a long form essay. Something can be created with the finest ingredients carefully sourced and prepared by caring hands. And yet we know man cannot live on tweets and sausage alone. Pigs probably shouldn’t either. Sooie!!!!

Categories
Aesthetics Reading

Day 1718 and The Abyss Stares Back

The glory of the first few weeks of fall in Montana, indeed most of the mountain west, is under appreciated.

We advertise the powdery snow & bright sunshine of our winters and the long temperate days of our summer for tourism, but I love the precious few middle days of transition as we approach Michaelmas season.

The harvest wraps, the fall begins in earnest with frost ever ready, and we prepare ourselves for darker days ahead.

I personally try to be outside as much as possible in this transitional period. Throwing on sneakers and a vest is much easier than snow boots and a parka.

Rambling across county pastures, over makeshift bridges across streams and across neighboring fields in the morning sets the tone for a positive day.

Someone acquired a new piebald

Once I’d returned home, the abyss of the open internet was there to stare back at me as I looked too hard upon it.

The prayers I had uttered in thanks for the glory of our mountains, the brightness of the sun, and the mercy granted to the living was pushed back by the darkness of greyzone algorithmic memetic warfare.

I am still recovering from travel so weak enough that I have little desire to self censor. The ebbs and flows of conflicting constructed realities are fighting for purchase on the American mind and it’s not pretty. God given inalienable rights are not on anyone’s mind when there are others to blame.

I hardly knew if I should pick up Heidegger, Nietzsche or (shuddering at the thought) Schmitt to make sense of apoplectic displays of poorly harnessed power being thrown about by competing and angry egregores.

What could I possibly do or say or read to make sense of anything? I suppose that’s how the abyss gets you. The Nothing only needs you to stand idly by as you are absorbed into the abyss. Michael Ende and Madeleine L’Engle may be better places to go to understand the abyss than Nietzsche. Lest we lose our sense of wonder in the horror.

Die unendliche Geschichte – 1979 Michael Ende

Categories
Culture

Day 1711 and Blood Moon Total Lunar Eclipse

I’m from a part of the world where dark skies can still be sought out with relative ease. Not because we are undeveloped, but because it’s harder to live with elevation and snow. If you had the will to climb you could see the Milky Way.

The Rocky Mountain regional corridor has only in the last thirty or so years turned into prairie suburban sprawl in Colorado.

Boulder was a small town with little between it and Denver but farmland. Now from Colorado Springs to Fort Collins the entire I-25 corridor is densely packed.

Anytime a lunar eclipse crosses the astronomical calendar, I wonder if children still search out the skies for wonder and study. I remember telescopes being a highly coveted birthday gift and whole classes would seek out observatories for blood moons and totality.

Lunar eclipses arise when Earth’s shadow swallows all or part of the moon, obscuring its surface. A total lunar eclipse is the most dramatic version of the event and is often referred to as a blood moon. NYT “How To Watch the Blood Moon and Total Lunar Eclipse on Sunday September 7th 2025”

If you are on the eastern side of the world from Europe to Australia you will have an opportunity to see today’s full moon be shadowed by Earth starting around 7pm in CEST. Check date and time for your own area.

Seeing the sky is a beautiful and universal human experience. Precious few of us have seen our planet but the night sky and our moon have figured heavily in the shared experiences of entire species for centuries.

Categories
Travel

Day 1685 and National Lampoon’s European Vacation Albania

We just wrapped up a week long “coastal convalescence” tour otherwise known as Alex and Julie’s European Vacation tour. Typically we take time off during shoulder season which is the off peak months for a destination.

Not being bound by school vacations or particular holiday schedules, shoulder season works better for many reasons from fewer guests to lower prices.

Mostly it’s because I struggle with high season summer heat and we live in one of the most in-demand areas for vacationing in America. Why go to Greece when I can go to Yellowstone? Why go to St Moritz when I can go to Big Sky?

And yet somehow between the Istanbul surgery incident and a general “why not” attitude we decided to be like the masses, head to Europe and enjoy the Ionian and Adriatic coastlines in high season. No we didn’t go to Sicily or Italy or France. We went to the Balkans.

Ksamil at sunset where you can see Greece.
High above the Mediterranean

If you pay attention you may have noticed a fondness for Albania which sounds odd but isn’t as unusual as you might imagine. Many older military families served in the Balkan campaigns and recognized the beauty of Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as Serbia and Kosovo.

The Ionian Sea is quite clear

Our Congressional representative Ryan Zinke served there as well many other Montanans. Heck, a guy I went to college with studied Balkan languages with the goal of being deployed there for peacekeeping operations with NATO in order to avoid being deployed to “the sandbox” during the war on terror years.

Albania in particular likes its American allies. They like us so much there are streets named after Madeleine Albright, a Clinton and both Bushes. There is even a town that made Trump an honorary mayor.

I wonder if this closeness to America has contributed to the country’s troubles in managing an ascension to the European Union despite being country you could easily mistake for Italy in climate, culture, scenery and history. It’s closer to Italy by boat than Helsinki is to Tallinn.

High above Vlore which is so close to Italy you can almost see it and can cross over by ferry

And yet they are treated as if they aren’t Europeans at all by dint of being on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. Which you’d think Germans would appreciate.

Alas Albanians prefer the good ol’ USA to Brussels and this is a problem. That Europe let in less European countries than Albania into both the EU and Schengen feels unfair.

And it sucks for them as their passports are some of the worst in the world despite producing superstars from Dua Lipa to Mira Murati. Don’t give me guff about corruption or timelines either. If Romania and Hungary are part of the bloc then surely they can hurry up and let a NATO ally in during this time of crisis for the continent.

In my opinion, Albania is in every way superior to Italy from the kindness of its people to the beauty of its countryside and the quality of its food. Even the Italian luxury houses have exported most of their leather goods and clothing manufacturing to the country but that’s meant to be secret.

So if you want to experience the mysteries of antiquity from Thucydides to the birth of Rome to its empire years don’t look simply to Greece or Italy but to the Balkans. Delphic temples, Melian cities, even a Roman emperor are from this region.

If you enjoy Positano style sea vistas and clear blue Ionian waters go to Albania. And then please tell Brussels to let them into the European Union.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1680 and Tricking Your Parasympathetic Systemic Into Offline Relaxation Mode

I was introduced to music curators by what you might call third spaces in the aughts. If you were very good, you might program television show but the work of designing audio atmosphere was often about hospitality.

Boutique hotels, luxury gyms, and luxury boutiques looking to set a mood would hire these talent for playlists that fit into their brand book.

We’ve come to appreciate just how much a full sensory experience encompasses every detail. Decor, lighting or even a house fragrance can all be ruined by overloading your guests with discordant noises.

Unless it’s a nightclub or cocktail lounge, the blending of audio spaces and creating the right vibe to open up your guests to the experience is about settling sympathetic nervous system into the openness that comes with the “rest and digest” chill of the parasympathetic response.

I was part of a team that made playlists for Milk Studio’s New York Fashion Week, looked over the shoulders of the creative director who hired a well known curator for their playlists.

Fashion runway shows in Paris, Milan and New York City would also hire these DJs sometimes being the top of the diffusion spear but they were often collaborating with hotels where the fashionistas stay.m

I saw how the Standard Hotels made choices for their properties and was inspired by their work to get even deeper into the best boutiques and their choices. The beloved Parisian fashion staple Stéphane Pompougnac who became the wildly successful Hotel Costss house DJ.

Hotel Costes 6:
Combining casual glamor, “retro-canaille” and smooth house, this compilation evokes the luxurious, eclectic and elegant atmosphere of Hotel Costes.

Stéphane Pompougnac (born 1968) is a French houseDJ and record producer best known for curating and mixing the Hôtel Costes compilation series

It’s become such a part of my own relaxation and time off routine, I can hear a few bars from Hotel Costes 6 (a particular favorite of mine) and immediately feel calmer. Amazing what a ritual we can make of music. Sure it is silly but you can’t beat decades of somatic learning.

Maybe I’m not always going “a la peche” but my body doesn’t know that. From there, all I need to do is open up an Ian M Banks paperback and I can slip into a short trip of my own. Amazing mow malleable our minds can be to repetition.

Brand collaborations are everywhere you look
Categories
Media

Day 1671 and Warenästhetik

I have a favorite book store in San Francisco is called City Lights. It’s an old Beat bookstore that carried the city through its left wing era.

They have a section called commodity aesthetics from which I treat myself to a fresh book from every time I visit San Francisco. I’ve got quite a collection from the habit.

Having spent the requisite time with the western cannon, I enjoy dabbling in critical theory and its decedents like commodity aesthetics as an adult.

The Frankfurt School has direct line from Horkheimer to the founder of commodity aesthetics Wolfgang Fritz Haug. Warenästhetik, in German, is the process of aestheticising products we make and consume.

Marxists go on about the seduction and manipulation of consumers in order to reinforce capitalist systems but it’s hard to ignore the impact of the field on what we make, use, and sell.

The wider world of why and what commodify is ever changing even as it recycles the same archetypes and patterns over and over again. See the Sydney Sweeney’s “good jeans” remake of Brooke Shields infamous Calvin Klein advertisement.

It’s amusing to me that the Marxist have put in more effort to understanding the nuts and bolts of making and selling desirable goods than capitalists do. Maybe that’s what they mean by praxis? The criticism and the practice come together in one bookshelf in a basement of a bookstore in North Beach.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1606 and Woody Allen Panopticon

The internet loves to have fights over which intellectual, religious, artistic, or political views are discredited by the sins of its people. We have to police all kinds of things lest the youth get the wrong impression.

If you dig into any serious gathering of humans you will be shocked by human nature. You shouldn’t be but Americans have it pretty good so we often are. This despite us living in a Woody Allen panopticon where we cannot separate the man from the work. We are forced to look at others sins constantly.

And it’s upsetting I won’t lie. Way more people than you’d like fall into the pederast camp. I didn’t even know that was a word till I met some Italians. Blessedly free of this knowledge in lived experience. Woody Allen, Michel Foucault (he gave us the panopticon) and Socrates were all committing sins against children. I’d argue you can skip Annie Hall but you shouldn’t skip Plato or Foucault.

Depending on whose authority you crave you the real danger to watch out for is different historical flavors of Marxists and fascists and where they settled.

Plenty of academics and journalists dislike understanding humans for who they were in their time and judging them in context of their output.

That’s dangerous according to more than a few scolds in the media and the academy. Drop the term Straussian and see how it goes over at a dinner party. Dangerous truths ahhh!

There are lots of little shibboleths for discerning which Hegelians took a turn with the Italian futurists. Have you heard of Russian Cosmism?Also dangerous. Don’t even get me started on what it means that JD Vance may or may not be an Ulster Scott and what that does or doesn’t mean to certain sects of reactionaries.

I honestly can’t keep up despite being as relatively close as one can come to being expert weird future fixated movements while not being a historian or a journalist.

Guilt by association in the process of living through history is both a horrifying and sticky business if we look too closely. I have a shelf full of Modernist Marxists which I’m certain wouldn’t have allowed me to survive the Red Scare despite my intense dislike for communism. So beware the Woody Allen panopticon. It comes for everyone. But also leave them kids alone.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture Reading

Day 1600 and Uncertain Milestones

I read some Charles Dickens today. No this isn’t a Great Expectations joke. Rather, I read the first seven paragraphs of his 900 page novel Bleak House.

Why? I wanted to test my literacy as part of social media’s great ongoing debate about humanity’s waning reading and writing abilities.

A Substacker & Twitter personality broke down a 2015 think-aloud reading comprehension study which analyzed the skills of English majors at two Kansas universities.

[They were asked to] read the first seven paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House out loud to a facilitator and then translate each sentence into plain English

They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities.

The Substacker Beloved Kitten has written about what constitutes mass literacy before using something called the PIAAC which has five levels of literacy.

If you are a knowledge professional you better hope you are a four but social media comments suggest most of us are not.

This methodology doesn’t even try articulate level 5. And as someone who occasionally sees what a real 1% outlier looks like I don’t disagree. Our best are in a league of their own.

So obviously as American funded “college for all” it was clear not all college attendees would on the right side of average. And as it turns out, the English majors at highly subsidized state universities (mostly white girls incidentally) had a lot of trouble understanding Dickens’s British family court tragedy.

I also don’t want to read that many pages of fog metaphors, and I have an entire tag dedicated to forced metaphors.

I took the test (speaking my answer into my phone) and it was harder than you think to simplify but I had the vocabulary.

Amusingly all of the test takers were sure they could easily finish the stupid book after most of them failed to understand even its basic concepts. I would not finish Bleak House.

Like those other white girls I am unlikely to be in the 1% of literacy when it comes 19th century British literature. Surely in my own skill stack (and it’s overlapping areas of expertise) I can approach 2SD on things. I suspect this blog and my general internet presence suggests I can do Level 4 reading. We think around what we can.

That seems adequate given I contribute what I like and communicate what is enjoyable on my own spaces. Here I am plodding along contributing sixteen hundred days of writing to the public discourse which is its own proof of literacy. It’s several novels worth of training data for our artificial intelligences.

I think about how much I do or don’t want to contribute to the maw of publicly indexed Internet because I believe we get better if we all contribute to this public good.

Our future is a shared coordination problem requiring we can comprehend and contribute to our commons. Maybe I understand enough Dickens to get by. He maybe has a dimmer view of legalistic thinking than I do. But I’m sure he’d see plenty of wretches in our times too.